Israel Vs. Hamas Is Civilization Vs. Savagery

Mideast: Celebration within Gaza after the bombing of a bus filled with innocent Israeli civilians is an object lesson on the so-called Palestine question. Those who would celebrate such a cowardly act are savages.

No one can imagine Washington’s troops firing shots to celebrate a supporter of American independence trying to kill a group of Royalist civilians. During the Cold War, U.S. support for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity would have dried up if he handed out candy after a Polish nationalist targeted, say, innocent Muscovites going to work.

We may live in a complex world, but evil is identifiable even when its practitioners claim their cause is good.

The gunfire across Gaza celebrating an explosion on a bus in central Tel Aviv on Wednesday is evil. And the Iranian-backed Hamas’ rulers praising the bombing, which injured 15 passengers, is evil.

“Hamas blesses the attack in Tel Aviv and sees it as a natural response to the Israeli massacres … in Gaza,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

The “Israeli massacres,” i.e. self-defensive airstrikes, are exactly how the U.S. would react if, let’s say, Mexico were doing to us what Hamas has been doing to Israel: firing hundreds of rockets into populated areas.

It is, in fact, what any civilized nation would be doing.

But only barbarians would hand out cakes in celebration of the bombing of a vehicle with innocent men, women and children, which was happening at Gaza’s main hospital on Wednesday. “Go back to Germany, Poland, Russia, America and anywhere else,” Hamas’ al-Qassam brigades warned Jews on Twitter.

Hamas’ al-Aqsa TV, run by a Palestinian parliament member, is already notorious, encouraging children to become terrorists, as when it depicted a 4-year-old girl holding an explosive, singing of killing Israeli soldiers as a suicide bomber. On Wednesday, the channel’s news reader prayed “to Allah the exalted that we see body bags in a short while” and joyfully reported that “the morale of Gaza residents is in the sky right now.”

As Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, wrote over 60 years ago, “The real opponents of Zionism can never be placated by any diplomatic formula: Their objection to the Jews is that the Jews exist, and in this particular case, that they exist in Palestine.”

Arthur James Balfour, author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish homeland, in 1904 as British prime minister was humming another tune, crusading against Jewish immigration into Britain.

But, as Conor Cruise O’Brien observed, even Balfour came to appreciate the “tremendous Jewish contribution” to the world, and ultimately saw “a Jewish Palestine as the focus for a new blaze of human creativity, a new enrichment of the culture of the world.”